In an attempt to further understand Stuhr, in his latest chapter
"From the Art of Surfaces to Control Societies and Beyond:
Stoicim, Postmodernism, and Pan-Machinism" (which is actually
skipping a chapter in the book, blame my professors, not me.) I
have decided to appropriate this journal to my own ends. Stuhr
references a billion (not quite literally) things in this chapter,
and I can't follow all of the references. There's some
URL's he puts in the text, music he expects the audience to
listen to, and a whole set-up to get the 'full
experience' of the chapter. While there is something to be
said for multi-media experiences, and their value
æsthetically in addition to philosophically, scientifically,
and whatever else to which you attribute the utility of experience,
I don't trust Stuhr's writing to convey his
notions clearly and accurately, even in part. How can I possibly
have confidence in the evocative, invocation, and perhaps even
revocation present in this much more nontraditional
paradigm of communication?

My answer? Respond in kind. If Stuhr wants to call up
philosophers I've not heard of, make allusions to cultural
artefacts I've not experienced, or appeal to æsthetics
I don't share, then I will push my own æsthetics,
cultural artefacts and experience into philosophy, just see where
they go. According to Stuhr, this is what he's trying to get
us to do anyway. By our listening to him to do it, are we not
coming to unique experience? Decide for yourself.

"People who know exactly what they want have always
frightened me, and Lise had known what she wanted for a long time,
and wanted nothing else at all. …and I'd seen enough
strangers' dreams, …, to know that most people's
inner monsters ware foolish things, ludicrous in the calm light of
one's own consciousness.

"[the scene is] like you're on a motorcycle at midnight,
no lights but somehow you don't need them, blasting out along
a cliff-high stretch of coast highways, so fast that you hang there
in a cone of silence, the bike's thunder lost behind you.
Everything, lost behind you….It's just a
blink… but it's one of the thousand things you
remember, go back to, incorporate into your own vocabulary of
feelings. … Freedom and death, right there, right there, a
razor's edge, forever.

"What I got was the big-daddy version of that, raw rush,
the king hell killer uncut real thing, exploding eight ways from
Sunday into a void that stank of poverty and lovelessness and
obscurity.

"And that was Lise's ambition, that rush, seen from
the inside."

—From The Winter Market by William Gibson

The above evokes unspeakable emotion, internal drive, the heart
of experience. Can we capture that, in our pan-machinistic
worldview? Can we, as in this story, record, process, duplicate,
and mass-produce compelling experience, if even not with such a
sophisticated technology as portrayed in the story? I would say,
given our technology and its capabilities today, we already, and
will continue to produce ever more compelling, even
'real,' experience. The machine of experience will
unite and fragment simultaneously; compelling experience is not
simple, easy, or straightforward, but a unity of compelling
experience will create a discourse as varied and complex as the
experience itself. Should we press onwards towards mass-produced,
commercial experience as a way to reëstablish democractic
unity? Perhaps. I think there is another way. (I just don't
know what.)

"[I might have found a way to] trust in whatever it is that
she's since become, or had built in her image, a program that
pretends to be Lise to the extent that it believes it's her.
I could have believed …, that she was so truly past it,
…, that nothing mattered to her except the hour of her
departure. That she threw away that poor sad body with a cry of
release, free of the bonds of polycarbon and hated flesh. But
seeing her there, …, I knew, once and for all, that no human
motive is ever entirely pure. Even Lise, … Was human in a
way I hated myself for admitting."
—From The Winter Market by William Gibson

But there is a danger. A real and serious danger in these hopes.
We can fly to our futures, our ultimate fate, consumers of packaged
dreams, consumers of democracy rather than creators. Will our
motives be as pure as the words on our lips? Can we mechanize our
thoughts as we mechanize our speech? Perhaps. But what do we
lose?

"The integrity of [the Bridge's] span was rigorous as the
modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality,
intent upon its own agenda. … The result was something
amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas
bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possesed a queer
medieval engery. By day, seen form a distance, it reminded him of
the ruin of England's Brighton Pier, as though viewed through
some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style."

"Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding
with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above
them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the
intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered poulation and its
zones of more private fantasy."

"Steam was rising from the pots of soup-vendors, beneath a
jagged arc of scavenged neon. Everything ran together, blurring,
melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and
singularity of the thing, and he'd walked slowly forward,
into that neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged
surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken
marble from the walls of forgotton banks, corrugated plastic,
polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull
and peeling in the salt air."
—From William Gibson's Virtual Light, chapter
"The Bridge"

I would say we lose what the above quote from Virtual
Light depicts. The organic human island in the midst of
technology, organically intertwined, symbiotic; somehow apart but
hopelessly interdependent. We, daily, hourly, seek to understand
this connection, our place, the place of our technology, where we
are and where we're going. Whether we need to change in
this way or that. There is hardly even a question
of the need for change. Writers like Alvin Toffler, who wrote
Future Shock in 1970 speak of change as the normative
assumption, not stability. Dynamism over Modernism, in a sense. Ray
Kurzweil, author of numerous books on the impact and progression of
technology in society, a futurist and innovator, as well as author,
puts the future squarely in the realm of technological control. He
paints technology as our salvation, not without risk or problem,
not smoothly, but disjointly and rapidly (on the human timescale we
know today) approaching the "Singularity." The world we
live in, by the time we (young adults) leave it, if we
leave it, will be nothing like today's world, just as
today's world is nothing like the stone age. Will
the transformation of our world bring about new paradigms in
democracy? Will democracy even seem reasonable? What will replace
it?

Nearly by definition these questions are unanswerable today. But
we can guess. My guess?